VI

We have a stake in all the past life of the globe. It is no doubt a

scientific fact that your existence and mine were involved in the

first cell that appeared, that the first zoophyte furthered our

fortunes, that the first worm gave us a lift. Great good luck came

to us when the first pair of eyes were invented, probably by the

trilobite back in Silurian times; when the first ear appeared,

probably in Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs grew

out of a fish's air-bladder, probably in Triassic times; when the

first four-chambered heart was developed and double circulation

established, probably with the first warm-blooded animal in Mesozoic

times.

These humble forms started the brain, the nervous system, the

circulation, sight, hearing, smell; they invented the liver, the

kidneys, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, and led the way to every

organ and power my body and mind have to-day. They were the

pioneers, they were the dim remote forebears, they conserved and

augmented the fund of life and passed it along.

All their struggles, their discipline, their battles, their

failures, their successes, were for you and me. Man has had the

experience of all the animals below him. He has suffered and

struggled as a fish, he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, he

has fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived in trees as a

monkey, he has inhabited caves with the wolf and the bear, he has

roamed the forests and plains as a savage, he has survived without

fire or clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the mastodon

and all the saurian monsters, he has held his own against great

odds, he has survived the long battles of the land and the sea, he

weathered the ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has seen

many forms become extinct. In the historic period he has survived

plague and pestilence, and want and famine. What must he have

survived in prehistoric times! What must he have had to contend with

as a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as a river-drift man! Before

he had tools or weapons what must he have had to contend with!

Nature was full of sap and rioted in rude strength well up to

Quaternary times, producing extravagant forms which apparently she

had no use for, as she has discontinued them.

In all these things you and I had our part and lot; of this prodigal

outpouring of life we have reaped the benefit; amid these bizarre

forms and this carnival of lust and power, the manward impulse was

nourished and forwarded. In Eocene times nearly half the mammals

lived on other animals; it must have been an age of great slaughter.

It favored the development of fleetness and cunning, in which we too

have an interest. Our rude progenitor was surely there in some form,

and escaped the slaughter. Then or later it is thought he took to

the trees to escape his enemies, as the rats in Jamaica have taken

to the trees to escape the mongoose. To his tree-climbing we

probably owe our hand, with its opposing thumb.

In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His story reads like

a fairy book. Never did nimble fancy of childhood invent such

transformations--only the transformations are so infinitely slow,

and attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike out the

element of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel and

startling than any hocus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the

crowd agape.

In every form man has passed through, he left behind some old member

or power and took on some new. He left his air-bladder and his gills

and his fins with the fishes; he got his lungs from the dipnoans,

the precursors of the amphibians, and from these last he got his

four limbs; he left some part of his anatomy with the reptile, and

took something in exchange, probably his flexible neck. Somewhere

along his line he picked up the four-chambered heart, the warm

blood, the placenta, the diaphragm, the plantigrade foot, the

mammary glands--indeed, what has he not picked up on the long road

of his many transformations? He left some of his superfluous

forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and

kept thirty-two. He picked up his brain somewhere on the road,

probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed and

enlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world! His

fear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness--all

his animal passions--he brought with him from his animal ancestors;

but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration,

his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions--have come to him

as a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, with another

order of senses--a finer sight, a finer touch, wrought in him by the

discipline of life, and the wonder of the world about him, beginning

de novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the bird, or the

color began de novo in the flower--struck out from preexisting

potentialities. The father of the eye is the light, and the father

of the ear is the vibration of the air, but the father of man's

higher nature is a question of quite another sort. About the only

thing in his physical make-up that man can call his own is his chin.

None of the orders below him seem to have what can strictly be

called a chin.

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians of

the sub-carboniferous times. The first tangible evidence of these

five toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest

record of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shale

from Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our first

five-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was

evidently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride of only

about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail instead of a cane. He

was probably taking a stroll upon the shores of that vast

Mediterranean Sea that occupied all the interior of the continent

when he crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning--how many

million years ago?--as we know from the imprint of the raindrops

upon the mud. Probably the shower did not cause him to quicken his

pace, as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his immediate

forbears were like, or what the forms were that connected him with

the fishes, we shall probably never know. Doubtless the great book

of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if we are ever lucky

enough to open it at the right place. How many other secrets, that

evolutionists would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves

hold!

It is something to me to know that it rained that day when our

amphibian ancestor ventured out. The weather was beginning to get

organized also, and settling down to business. It had got beyond the

state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier ages, and the

raindrops were playing their parts. Yet, from all the evidence we

have, we infer that the climate was warm and very humid, like that

of a greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns and rushes

and lycopods, was very rank, but there was no grass, or moss, no

deciduous trees, or flowers, or fruit, as we know these things.

A German anatomist says that we have the vestiges of one hundred and

eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,--now

useless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix.

Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from the

fishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a

vestige--of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we no doubt

inherited from our simian ancestors.

How life refined and humanized as time went on, sobered down and

became more meditative, keeping step, no doubt, with the

amelioration of the soil out of which all life finally comes. Life's

bank account in the soil was constantly increasing; more and more of

the inorganic was wrought up into the organic; the value of every

clod underfoot was raised. The riot of gigantic forms ceased, and

they became ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased, and left

ashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the oak, the olive, the palm

came in. The giant sea serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, the

swine, the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental mammals

developed. The horse grew in size and beauty. When we first come

upon his trail, he is a four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox.

Later on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his toes gone;

still later--many hundred thousand years, no doubt--we find him the

size of a donkey, with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach the

superb creature we know.

The creative energy seems to have worked in geologic time and in the

geologic field just as it works here and now, in yonder vineyard or

in yonder marsh,--blindly, experimentally, but persistently and

successfully. The winged seeds find their proper soil, because they

search in every direction; the climbing vines find their support,

because in the same blind way they feel in all directions. Plants

and animals and races of men grope their way to new fields, to new

powers, to new inventions.

Indeed, how like an inventor Nature has worked, constantly improving

her models, adding to and changing as experience would seem to

dictate! She has developed her higher and more complex forms as man

has developed his printing-press, or steam-engine, from rude,

simple beginnings. From the two-chambered heart of the fish she made

the treble-chambered heart of the frog, and then the four-

chambered heart of the mammal. The first mammary gland had no

nipples; the milk oozed out and was licked off by the young. The

nipple was a great improvement, as was the power of suckling in the

young.

Experimenting and experimenting endlessly, taking a forward step

only when compelled by necessity,--this is the way of

Nature,--experimenting with eyes, with ears, with teeth, with limbs,

with feet, with toes, with wings, with bladders and lungs, with

scales and armors, hitting upon the backbone only after long trials

with other forms, hitting upon the movable eye only after long ages

of other eyes, hitting on the mammal only after long ages of

egg-laying vertebrates, hitting on the placenta only

recently,--experimenting all around the circle, discarding and

inventing, taking ages to perfect the nervous system, ages and ages

to develop the centralized ganglia, the brain. First life was like a

rabble, a mob, without thought or head, then slowly organization

went on, as it were, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from

tribe to nation, or centralized government--the brain of man--all

parts duly subordinated and directed,--millions of cells organized

and working on different functions to one grand end,--cooperation,

fraternization, division of labor, altruism, etc.

The cell was the first invention; it is the unit of life,--a speck

of protoplasm with a nucleus. To educate this cell till it could

combine with its fellows and form the higher animals seems to have

been the aim of the creative energy. First the cell, then

combinations of cells, then combinations of combinations, then more

and more complex combinations till the body of man is reached, where

endless confraternities of cells, all with different functions,

working to build and sustain different organs,--brain, heart,

liver, muscles, nerves,--yet all working together for one grand

end--the body and mind of man. In their last analysis, all made up

of the same cells--their combinations and organization making the

different forms.

Evolution touches all forms but tarries with few. Many are called

but few are chosen--chosen to lead the man-impulse upward. Myriads

of forms are left behind, like driftwood caught in the eddies of a

current. The clam has always remained a clam, the oyster remained an

oyster. The cockroach is about the same creature to-day that it was

untold aeons ago; so is the shark, and so are many other forms of

marine life. Often where old species have gone out and new come in,

no progress has been made.

Evolution concentrates along certain lines. The biological tree

behaves like another tree, branches die and drop off (species become

extinct), others mature and remain, while some central shoot pushes

upward. Many of the huge reptilian and mammalian branches perished

in comparatively late times.

As nothing is more evident than that the same measure of life or of

vital energy--power of growth, power of resistance, power of

reproduction--is not meted out equally to all the individuals of a

species, or to all species, so it is evident that this power of

progressive development is not meted out equally to all races of

mankind, or to all of the individuals of the same race. The central

impulse of development seems to have come from the East, in historic

times at least, and to have followed the line of the Mediterranean,

to have culminated in Europe. And this progress has certainly been

the work of a few minds--minds exceptionally endowed.

For the most part the barbarian races do not progress. Their

exceptional minds or characters do not lead the tribes to higher

planes of thought, In all countries we still see these barbarous

people which man in his progress has left behind. Our civilization

is like a field of light that fades off into shadows and darkness.

There is this margin of undeveloped humanity on all sides. Always

has it been so in the animal life of the globe; the higher forms

have been pushed up from the lower, and the lower have remained and

continued to multiply unchanged.

It seems as if some central and cherished impulse had pushed on

through each form, and by successive steps had climbed from height

to height, gaining a little here and a little there, intensifying

and concentrating as time went on, very vague and diffuse at first,

embryonic so to speak, during the first half of the great geologic

year, but quickening more and more, differentiating more and more,

delayed and defeated many times, no doubt, yet never destroyed,

leaving form after form unchanged behind it, till it at last reached

its goal in man.

After evolution has done all it can do for us toward solving the

mystery of creation, much remains unsolved.

Through evolution we see creation in travail-pains for millions of

years to bring forth the varied forms of life as we know them; but

the mystery of the inception of this life, and of the origin of the

laws that have governed its development, remains. What lies back of

it all? Who or what planted the germ of the biological tree, and

predetermined all its branches? What determined one branch to

eventuate in man, another in the dog, the horse, the bird, or the

reptile?

From the finite or human point of view we feel compelled to say some

vaster being or intelligence must have had the thought of all these

things from the beginning or before the beginning.

It is quite impossible for me to believe that fortuitous

variation--variation all around the circle--could have resulted in

the evolution of man. There must have been a predetermined tendency

to variation in certain directions. To introduce chance into the

world is to introduce chaos. No more would the waters of the

interiors of the continents find their way to the sea, were there

not a slant in that direction, than could haphazard variation,

though checked and controlled by natural selection, result in the

production of the race of man. This view may be only the outcome of

our inevitable anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, no

matter how deep we dive or high we soar.